SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the you-should-see-what-you're-missing! dept.
Guardzilla Shuts Down, Leaving Security Camera Customers Stranded:
Guardzilla, a small home security camera company, has quietly gone out of business, leaving behind unpatched security flaws, barely or nonworking cameras in lots of consumers' homes, and piles of essentially useless cameras that are still being sold at Bed Bath & Beyond, QVC, and other retailers.
Consumer Reports learned earlier this month that Guardzilla had closed its doors when our test engineers tried to follow up about security problems they found with the Guardzilla 360. We disclosed the issues to Guardzilla last fall. The company fixed one problem, but never addressed a second one.
The company has stopped responding to emails and its phone number is no longer working. A message posted on its website at the beginning of June reads: “We deeply regret that these troubling times have caused us to close our doors. We are sorry for any inconvenience this has caused, as we will be unable to continue support for the Guardzilla product line.”
Like other internet-connected security cameras, Guardzilla cameras stored users' video clips on corporate servers. The servers continued working intermittently until mid-June but now appear to be completely shut down.
[...] In addition to Bed Bath & Beyond and QVC, these cameras can still be purchased at Amazon Marketplace, Buy Buy Baby, eBay, and Newegg Marketplace. Consumer Reports reached out to these companies to find out why they continue to sell Guardzilla cameras. Only eBay had replied by the time of publication, and says it will continue to sell the cameras for now.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Frosty Piss on Friday June 26 2020, @07:43PM (3 children)
And yet another IOT boondoggle bites the dust. Most likely they wanted to build some consumer monster that a larger Blood Sucker would buy out for bizzilions, and when it became clear that none of the Big Players where interested in their “technology”, they pulled the plug. Both real human beings and the snake oil salesmen that latched on to IOT are starting to see that most IOT is nothing more than the Whopper Chopper from Ronco.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Friday June 26 2020, @11:34PM (1 child)
And the great thing is, if these devices had actually just been internet enabled it wouldn't matter because you could apply some standard protocol that their shitty cloud interface wraps and control the devices another way.
But because everything must be a walled garden for squeezing an extra penny out of your customers it's pure hell.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Saturday June 27 2020, @02:16AM
Be very leery of the business phrase "customer lock-in".
It's a the business phrase meaning "customer trap". Naive people step in them. Might as well consider all payments and obligations to them as a sunk cost.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 3, Informative) by driverless on Saturday June 27 2020, @02:37AM
That's one great thing about non-IoS cameras, they're controlled via ONVIF, stream H.264, and so on, you don't need any proprietary lock-in system to drive them but can choose whatever you prefer from commercial or open-source sources. I don't know why anyone would buy one of these dumb-"smart" cameras when you can get your pick of generic IP camera and connect it to your pick of generic IP camera back-ends.